Today is MY birthday!

Today is my birthday.

I went into tireless effort on behalf of public education in 1981. 

I took every brain cell I had along with me.

I did so fully in after teaching two years in an Appalachian school instructing art half time, and caring for a mom (with a stroke) and a grandmom dying of Alzheimers. I often walked twelve miles to work. One way.

I was poor, oh man, but didn't fully understand.

I thought I had a lot to give to kids and education, and this was more honorable than business. 

I felt they were lucky to get me.

I went to work in South Central LA in 1983. The time of crack wars and I had no safety net. I borrowed three thousand from the credit union to be able to get an LA apartment. That took a few or ten years to re-pay. I had never seen people in lives like I now absorbed. All black and broken.

I shared my 2 bedroom apartment with three others and my part of the rent was still over half my paycheck. Or $1200.

I taught a class of 42 at 93rd Street School, and darn near died of cytomeglia virus. I weighed 92 pounds. Then.

I spent the next 32 or more years in various parts of the state of California working under burdens like enormous class-sizes-it meant a lot to teach essentially two classes for the price of one, no material support at all, issues of language, underfunding, spending my limited funds to do this work, training, administration, bullies and heartbreakers.

I earned my living so that now my check take home is less than my kids coming out of college earn.

Public education has consumed my life. How to solve the intractable issues of modern poverty, of race, of immigration, of all the ills that funnel downward in an upwardly mobile world.No excuses NCLB architects demanded a standard, accountability and punishment. We must have the ability to break you.

Today is my birthday. I am that tenured teacher that has more than five years on the job. The one that gained weight. And dreamed of writing a book. And wrote.

On a blog.

No one maybe needs to think about my role in speaking up on public ed now, or in actually educating the thousand or so kids I came to care for. 

Among them, those I taught, are ones that took the time to wish me love today. To say no matter what-Happy Birthday Sarah. Like Mary Jane who I gave a Barbie too long ago into her matress on the floor home with a chair. Which I see in the past as she graduates her children now in a beautiful home she earned. Here is what she wrote to me today:
"Happy bday to one of the most wonderful teachers ever! Til this day the impact you had in my life remains. I have the fondest memories of you and Mr Puglisi as if it were only yesterday. May God bless you with many more....and may the impact you had in my life continue on to many others xoxo"

Actually her impact on me remains.

Indelible.

These are the lessons in public education.

From her I learned more about my role in children's lives.

And what America has been, to many.

I'm here to ask we strengthen public education. There would be a gift.

 That we improve leadership- as I believe I did by supporting my husband in becoming a good public education leader. It's really the heart of a significant part of why there are issues-inadequate leaders in almost all aspects of this work. We lack leadership in the storm. I'm here to ask poverty be seen as something the entire community must address. The rich can best address it by becoming the student of the children I teach. By needing less and then knowing more. We need to stop allowing children to go un-diagnosed and unsupported by aides, and 1 to 1, and smaller groups and rooms with fewer crowds-we just piss on too many kids by acting a part beneath us- to save the $. We need to provide arts. Actually be creative over preach about how great it is for the wealthy who reap it. We need to bring to public education dream facilities-and aid the rich in doing that-they once built art museums and libraries as their edifices with their names-now they can build the dreamers schools.... We need to address public education as NOT a giant wound we can bleed until the patient dies- as we are doing- and have done to healthcare-how can I gain wealth here- must become how can we better serve. We need to take business out of it. It should shame us to product place, Kardashianize and brand our schools. It ought to pain us to see the class system into place by age four.

And we ought to stop making it all a bad reality show with so little reality.

It ought to be about not a system to consumerize.

It ought to be a public system based on academic excellence, joy, invention, possibility, growth.

My birthday celebrates my children, my own, going to the public schools I taught in- in some of the areas of the greatest poverty in our country.

It celebrates my walking the walk. I celebrate that because it is real.

I did not place them in private schools but they rose, two of them, to qualify for the elite- to the public college- when the choices were their own.

My birthday celebrates not a moment of revelation when I dropped NCLB after constructing it, or loving the notions of it, after many convincing me in my blindness architecting,  but when I was broken by it all.

To pieces.

And in nervous breakdown spent a year in solitude painting to recover, from the rigor imposed through me on 6 year olds.NCLB is your nightmare to erase your penance for your birthday. Not mine.

By those now happily now pasting up sonnets to creativity. And to you.

Love the book. I do.

My birthday celebrates relationships with over a thousand beings that I love, know, grew relationships with, taught, fed, paid for, and saw into lives as best I could. And those I didn't. But I care so much about it. I always will. I'm not wired to convert to something else.

I had the sight.

My birthday wasn't a tweet.

Of elevation for all the fine work on behalf of children everywhere.

By someone who appreciates my appearances and marriages and assets and education and writing and finds the time to send their love to my work in public education. I didn't show up at the marches. I was the march, with the ones that showed up at the public door. They know me.

But my birthday amazes me as news this year brought this to my doorstep.

One child once who was taken away for a time for a mom giving him crack, who was tiny, fragile and beaten down. Is starring in his own life and came for a hug, brawny, playing ball near enough at a professional level to have hope and a counselor raising foster kids. He found me again to help me know truth.

A tremendous worry of my public school life.

Personal and deep twenty years down the road.

and of a gifted beauty, with a troubled brother, long ago kids that were in my life, 6 years old. She was such a shiny child. Killed a year ago I learned thrown from a motorcycle into the nothingness, a momma, no helmet, a tragedy my heart gets to hold. Her Destiny. For that was her name not but a few blocks from the school she once looked to for a public education who had dreams and a path and things got brighter.

And then.....

It is my birthday and I spent my life in public education.

It has been quite a day and I wish myself the strength and capacity to give this life another year in service to the children in our nation that needed public school as I so obviously once needed.

It is to those I serve I hope for that gift.

Sarah Puglisi.